This is the fourth installment of a 4-part tutorial series I’m doing, Freelancing 101: A Dead Simple Method to Get Your First Freelance Work. In this series, I’m walking you through the exact process I used to get my first freelance clients.
In this step, I’m going to show you how to get qualified traffic to the YouTube video you create in Part 3. Which means it’s time for a little guerrilla marketing.
(By the way, I have a full course where I go through this “guerrilla” promotion strategy in detail, including exactly what to say when you post in these groups and how to consistently stay under the “spammer” radar, build good will and become a respected authority… and funnel it all to your freelancers services. I cheekily call it A Spammer’s Guide to Get More Clients and you can learn more about it at https://johnmorrisonline.com/spammer.)
Go to Twitter and enter your broad-match search term in the Twitter search. Then, click the “Latest” tab. Scroll down and find people having the problem you solve with your video. Here’s a few examples I found for the search “wordpress database error”:
Reply to these tweets with something simple like: “Don’t know if you’re still having this issue, but thought this video might help: <linktoyourvideo.com>.” And, that’s it. Because your video actually helps people, you can send it to people like this without coming across as “spamming”.
Quora
Same deal. Here’s a series of questions that come up when you search “wordpress database” error on Quora.com:
With Quora, you can’t just post your video. So, what you do is take the first three “checks” in your solution checklist from Part 1 and post them as your answer. Then, include your video at the bottom of your answer.
If you wrote out your video script as a blog post as I advised in Part 3, then you’ll already have this written. So, just copy the first 3 or so points from that blog post and paste them in as your answer. I’ve had answers I wrote on Quora emailed out to more than a million people. Imagine what kind of traction your video (and, ultimately, your freelance services) could get if that happens.
Stack Exchange/Stack Overflow
Again, same process. Search StackExchange and/or StackOverflow for your search term. Find relevant questions and answer them. Post a link to your video, inconspicuously, within your answer.
Google+ Communities
Yes. I said Google+. Many of the communities there are still highly active. Find on relevant to the error you’re solving. For example, this is a WordPress community I belong to. It has 111,000 members. Use the “Search Community” tool to search for your search term:
Also, subscribe to any relevant communities, participate and promote your video(s) if/when appropriate. You can also use these communities to develop new service offerings.
Facebook Groups
Almost identical to Google+ Communities. Find relevant groups, join them, promote your video(s) if/when appropriate for someone’s question. Use it to develop new ideas. Here’s a Facebook group I belong to about WordPress. It has 31,000 members:
Google Adwords
So, this is the one you’ll probably resist the most, but it’s also the most effective. Imagine whenever someone searches for your exact search term, your video showed up at the top of that search without you having to spend months getting it organicly ranked there.
You could just have it there today?
That’s Google Adwords in a nutshell. You can buy your way to the top. And, often for not very much. I average about 4 cents per view with my ads:
So, let’s say you spent $1/day advertising your video this way. That would be 25 views/day or 750 views/month and it’s cost you $30/month. Let’s say you got just 1 job as result of this and it paid you $150. That’s STILL a profit of $120. How quickly would you start spending more if every $1 you spent brought you $5 in sales.
I’d exchange $1 bills for $5 bills as fast as I could.
And, the best part is… if you’d make a good video… advertising your videos this way will help them, eventually, rank on their own and get organic traffic you don’t have to pay for.
So, I strongly encourage you to consider it.
Stepping Back
If we step back, then, and look at this entire strategy what we’ve got is an urgent problem, people are willing to pay money to solve, a freelance service offering to solve that problem and a system to consistently promote that service in a way that doesn’t make use feel spammy. This is how you build a freelance business piece by piece.
Because, you can build 5, 10, 20 or more of these.
So, let’s say you build out 10. And, each of those 10 bring you 3 clients per month. And, you charge $200/project. That’s 30 clients/month. $6,000/month. Or, $72,000/year. That’s a damn good salary for most people. And, you’re only doing on project per day, on average. Which will probably only take a few hours.
So, again, don’t under-estimate how lucrative small $200 and $300 projects like this can be.
Anyway, hopefully, you enjoyed the series and, most importantly, you start building this and creating an income for yourself. Thanks for riding along with me.
